GTK+ 2.9.0 has been released. This is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.10. For completeness: "GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites."

actually, applications implemented that framework by themselves - it has been integrated back by gtk.

True, I think they use that as a benchmark as to whether they include a particular feature in the GTK kit itself - if there are enough applications using the functionality, to reduce duplication, throw it into the gtk library - you could say it is a rather democratic/freemarket way of doing things, let the majority speak as to the usefulness of something.

Although I'm a big KDE fan (using since 1.0), GTK is a great tool kit, what I think lets it down is the incompleteness of GNOME in terms of its infrastructure - which always seems to appear to look like half-completed projects, cobbled together with hype surround features that *might* appear in the future; HAL and DBUS being examples of this phenominon.